Archive for the ‘despair’ Category

“He was a man amongst boys….” He was astrong-willed renaissance man, admired by friends. The son of a Gaithersburg surgeon, the charming focal figure of some Montgomery Village kids… barbecue perfectionist and restaurateur, the former undrafted free agent who carved out a nine-year NFL career on the offensive line, and the husband and father of three…

By Andrew Astleford
Special to The Washington Post
Sunday, November 9, 2008; Page D01

On the last night of his life, Tom McHale arrived at the suburban Tampa apartment of Martin Jackson, a 29-year-old furniture salesman McHale had met only a few months earlier at the drug rehabilitation clinic they attended. McHale had been staying at the one-bedroom apartment in Wesley Chapel, Fla., after a falling-out with his wife.

According to the account Jackson later gave Pasco County sheriff deputies, McHale was drunk when he stumbled through the doorway at 10 p.m. At some point, he inhaled cocaine and swallowed no fewer than three Xanax pills. He also told Jackson he was looking forward to going to rehab the next day.

At 8:30 the next morning, according to Jackson’s account, Jackson awoke to find McHale sitting on his couch, crumpling a just-finished can of Coca-Cola and eating leftover pie. Then McHale got up, walked past the clothes that were strewn about, entered the apartment’s lone bedroom and settled into the ruffled sheets on Jackson’s bed.

About 45 minutes later, Jackson noticed that McHale wasn’t breathing. He called 911, dragged McHale onto the floor and administered CPR. McHale vomited just as paramedics arrived, but they could not revive him.

It is not exactly a blinding insight to note that the Republican Party has lost its way. The election ofBarack Obama was simply the result of an intellectual decline that began with the start of President Bush‘s reelection campaign in the summer of 2003 and continued unabated, culminating in Gov. Sarah Palin‘s unabashed appeals this year to resentful, blue-collar Republican culture warriors.

By Dov S. Zakheim
The Washington Post
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Palin’s error, John McCain‘s error and the GOP‘s error was to assume that a shrinking slice of the U.S. population could constitute an increasingly large and influential faction of the party. There are simply too few culturally conservative whites to sustain a national political party. At most, that community can contribute to a larger coalition; it cannot constitute that coalition on its own.

How did we lose our bearings so badly? In late 1998, when I joined then-Texas Gov. George W. Bush’s foreign policy team (famously dubbed the “Vulcans”), I was going to work for a man who stood for five key principles that many of us thought would underpin a national Republican majority for decades to come. Last week’s failure stemmed from my party’s failure to hew to these values.

The first and best-known of these was “compassionate conservatism,” exemplified by the insistence that no child be left behind in poverty and despair — a reflection of President Bush’s determination to improve the lot of underprivileged Americans, especially minorities.